LB 



PUBLICATIONS OF THE CENERAL 
EDUCATION BOARD 



OCCASIONAL PAPERS, No. 1 

THE COUNTRY SCHOOL 
OF TO-MORROW 

FREDERICK T. GATES 



I'luMii 13 1513 



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GENERAL EDrCATION IlO.\IlD 

17 Battery ri„ME New York Citt 

1913 



E IS- 592. 



THE COUNTRY SCHOOL OF 
TO-MORROW 

IN WHICH YOUNG AND OLD \\1I,L BE TAUGHT IN PIt,\CTICABLE WAYS 

HOW TO MAKE RURAL LIFE BEAUTIFUL, INTELLIGENT, 

FRUITFUL, RECREATIVE, HEALTHFUL, AND JOYOUS 

BY 

FREDERICK T. GATES 

(CHAIRMAN OF THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD) 

THROWN on a screen at a recent conference on rural life 
was a series of photographs of country school houses in 
various states, taken by superintendents of rural schools. 
A few were neatly constructed and about them were pleasant 
grounds. The larger number were small, one-roomed structures 
set on pegs, weather-blackened, window-smashed, often with 
wrecked entrance steps and lockless door; for chimney, a length of 
stove-pipe thrust through side or back; for furniture, a perpendicu- 
lar combination of bench and desk, well-fitted to be an engine of 
torture. Improvement of the grounds had rarely been conceived. 
On the contrary, the original picturesqueness of wild nature had 
been defaced and belittcred. From November onward, for tlu-ee 
to seven months, somewhat less than one half of the school popula- 
tion of the district may be found there, usually taught by a young 
girl, often a last year's older pupil of this or a neighboring school. 
Enter, and you shall see her painfully teachmg her class to read 
sentences of English, quite likely as one would pronounce the 
successive words in the pcri^endicular columns of a spelling book. 
Such in the main, we were told, are very many of the rural district 
schools of the South, and similar are many in the Northern States. 
Continuing the series of pictures, the inspectors and physicians 



4 

of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission came forward. They had 
caught the schools in session, and ])hotoj!;raphed teacher and 
pupils, grouped in front of the school house. In some instances 
all, teacher and piupils alike, were suffering from hookworm disease. 
Their emaciated, misshapen, or bloated bodies, their sad, pale 
listless, hopeless faces, marked with habitual suffering, faces 
which no art could charm into a smile that would not be ghastly, 
told the story of disease and neglect. There are well nigh or quite 
two million of these children in the South, between six and sucteen 
years of age, weighed down, arrested, and stunted physically and 
mentally by this disease, many thousands each year finding relief 
from it in death. This number must be multiplied by the indirect 
toU of increased fatality in other diseases, traceable solely to this 
complication. Sixty thousand people, most of them children, 
have already been treated in North Carolina alone, and the 
work has been conducted systematically in a few counties only. 
Here is a word picture drawn by one of the State Superinten- 
dents of the Rockefeller Sanitarj' Commission, of the crowds, 
often numbering several hundreds, which throng his improvised 
dispensaries: 

"The [Dcople come from far and near, from all stations in life. 
They come on trains, by boat, in wagons, carts, and buggies. 
Many come on foot from ten to twenty miles. Some, too weak 
to make the journey and falling by the wayside, are picked up by 
passing vehicles and brought in. Some, unable to stand or sit, are 
brought in on stretchers. The results following the treatment 
are indeed marvelous. A gain in weight of a pound a day is 
common. To sec the crowds, to witness their transformation 
from invalidism, wasted ambition, and poverty, to health, lui])- 
piness, activity, and prosperity, brings to one's mind the mir- 
acles of the New Testament, and the healing of the multi- 
tudes." 

The inspectors not confining their work to liookworm disease, 
have given all the children in many schools a general physical 
examination. They report 40 to Oo per cent, of the children 
defective and more or less disabled from other preventable and 
curable ailments. 



A VISION OF THE RKMEDV 

Is there aught of remedy for this neglect of rural life? Let us, 
at least, yield ourselves to the gratifications of a beautiful dream 
that there is. In our dream, we have limitless resources, and {he 
people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. 
The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, 
unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a 
grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make 
these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of 
learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them 
authors, orators, })oets, or men of letters. We shall not search for 
embrjo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish 
even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, 
doctors, j)reachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have 
ample supply. W'e are to follow the admonitions of the good 
apostle, who said, "Mind not high things, but condescend to men 
of low degree." And generally, with respect to these high things, 
all that we shall try to do is just to create presently about these 
country homes an atmosphere and conditions such, that, if by 
chance a child of genius should spring up from the soil, that genius 
will surely bud and not be blighted. Putting, therefore, all high 
things quite behind us, we turn w ith a sense of freedom and delight 
to the simple, lowly, needful things that promise well for rural life. 
For the task that we set before ourselves is a very simple as well 
as a verj' beautiful one : to train these people as we find them 
for a perfectly ideal life just where they are— yes, ideal, for we 
shall allow ourselves to be extravagant since we are only dreaming; 
call it idyllic, if you like — an idyllic life under the skies and 
within the horizon, however narrow, where they first open their 
eyes. We arc to try to make that life, just where it is, healthful, 
intelligent, efficient, to fill it with thought and purpose, and with a 
gracious social culture not without its joys. 

EVKRV INDUSTRY IN A CURRICULUM 

Let us take, for illustration, as the rural school unit, a territory 
or township perhaps sLx miles square, thirty-si.\ square miles, 
containing some twenty-five thousand acres and at present one 



hundred and lifty families or more. We shall need a group of 
school buildings, and these wc will [)lace as near the centre as 
possible and for the more distant pupils arrange daily conveyance 
in groups. We shall need ver>- ample grounds, many acres. 
We will return to this, for just now we prefer to conceive our 
school grounds in the ultimate purjjosc of our work as embracing 
the entire township, since our school in its aim includes everybody, 
old as well as yoimg; it is to be in session all the year round, and 
everj-onc shall have something yet to learn always before him. 
Every industry in the district finds place in our curriculum. 
Every kitchen, bam, dairy, shop, is a laboratory for our school. 
The growing crops, tlie orchards, the vineyards, the gardens, the 
forests, the streams, the domestic animals, nay, even the tools of 
every farm, are part of our scientific equipment. The horizon 
forms the v.alls of our museum of natural history and the sky its 
roof, and all the life within is material and specimen for our study. 

HEALTH THE FIRST LESSON 

Our first plans shall be for health, as the basis of all well being 
and well doing. We shall ferret out the local causes of ill health 
in the family and in the community, also in plant and animal life. 
We shall call to our aid, of course, the experts, from the chemical 
and agricultural colleges and universities, our schools of forestry 
and of veterinary medicine. They shall examine and report. 
They shall lecture and demonstrate before us and be in constant 
correspondence with us. We shall submit to them our too difCcult 
problems and they shall solve them for us. 

Closely associated with health is the daily supply of fofid. "I 
was an hungered, and ye gave Me meat." It should be sufficiently 
varied, regularly provided, suitably and appetizingly cooked. 
Every girl and every boy shall be taught what to eat, how^ to eat, 
and how to cook. At least three times a day throughout his life, 
every one of us must eat, and the question of healthful and nutri- 
tious diet is perhaps the most important single question in life. 
Nor lives the man to whom this very thing is not by Providence 
designed to be no inconsiderable part of his daily .satisfactions. 
The dear old lady came much nearer the heart of things than many 
a divinity professor when, being about to pass to her reward and 



her pastor asking her which of tlie divine mercies she felt, at such a 
time, to have been most precious, she replied, '• Well, I have always 
enjoyed my victuals." 

Then comes the question of shelter. "I was a stranger and ye 
took Me in." We shall teach all that it is necessarj' to know 
about the sanitation of a home, from cellar to garret, the need of 
spotless cleanliness within it, of neatness, taste, and beauty about it. 
We shall show the value of ventilation, light, warmth and the best 
methods of securing them. We shall study the question of drain- 
age, sewerage, the disjjosal of waste, the water supply, infection, 
its source and prevention. We shall plan model kitchens and 
model sanitary arrangements, model rural homes. We shall 
render the home and all its surroundings tasteful, comfortable, and 
healthful. 

The matter of clothing shall not be neglected. "Naked, and ye 
clothed Me." We shall study cloth, its methods of manufacture, 
tests of its quality. Every person shall be able to distinguish 
between the spurious and the genuine and to calculate economy 
in clothing to a nicety. Every girl shall be taught to cut, fit, and 
make with her own hands the ordinary clothing of the family. 
The matter of sanitary clothing is not unimportant. We call to 
mind that, for a century past, one Titanic, at the least, full of 
children, with some adults, has gone down every month in the 
South, for lack of knowledge of a few simple facts about the 
hygiene of rural homes and their surroundings, and for lack of 
proper clothing for the feet of the children. Our work on hygiene 
shall be very thorough, penetrative and persistent, North as well 
as South. We shall have periodic examinations of all the members 
of our school by qualified e.Y{)erts. We shall teach the hygiene 
of the various members of the body, the hygiene of the eye, the 
teeth, the digestive system, the hygiene of sex, of marriage, of 
infancy, of age. "I was sick, and ye visited Me." 

LESSONS IN FARMING 

So much for health, for food, for clothing, and for shelter. But 
rich delights still remam to us. We have only as yet laid the 
foimdations. We are now prejiared to teach these children to 
conquer and to harness nature within their horizon to their service 



and to the service of the world. The farm dtnion->tr;itors of the 
General Education Board in the South are securing on demonstra- 
tion farms in each state about double the average yield of cotton 
per acre. Their knowledge of seed selection and cotton culture, 
if universally api)lied, would double the cotton croj) and bring to 
the cotton raiser at the very least $240,000,000 added profits 
annually. One remarks in passing that this possible increase of 
$240,000,000 net profit on cotton alone in one year is perhaps four 
times the entire money value of all the pro|)erty which all the 
institutions of higher learning in the cotton belt have amassed in 
two generations, so complete is their isolation from the life and 
interests of the people. 

The corn clubs of the General Education Board are demonstrat- 
ing throughout the South that from two to five times the present 
annual yield per acre may be won from the soil. The same is 
possible of potatoes. The canning clubs of the same Board are 
showing profits of from $100 to $250 per acre for the girls of the 
family. It is very certain that scientific farming, conducted as a 
business, will multiply the annual net profits of the Southern 
farmer by at least four. It was a Southern state — North Caro- 
lina — that won at the Paris Exposition the first prize for the best 
apples in the world. In our dream, every horizon, from Virginia 
to Te.xas and from Maine to California, shall be studied with 
regard to its possibilities, both in abundance and variety of prod- 
ucts; and similar climates and soils the world over, including the 
Orient, shall be explored and ransacked for adapted fruits, vege- 
tables, grasses, cereals of value. 

We are perhaps ready now to go back to our centra! school, 
with its very ample grounds. Ample they will need to be, for the 
school itself is to be, within the limits of child life, a microcosm of 
the life of the whole community. Not, indeed, of the life of the 
community as it is, for the adult population for a time will lag far 
behind the children. Our school shall be a picture in little of the 
community as it is to be, in what we called its ideal, its idyllic life. 
The children themselves shall form a community, with allotments 
and employments, a common social and perhaps a common manu- 
facturing and commercial life of their own, on these ample grounds. 
They shall i)erform for themselves, under the guidance of skilled 
instructors, those agricultural operations as arts which the best 



science of agriculture shall prescribe. They shall all be demon- 
strators of the hij^hcst achievable results in field, garden, kitchen, 
sewing room, orchard, vineyard, pasture, dairy, lawn, and meadow, 
not forgetful of the flowers and of the beauty of the landscape. 

TEACHING WHAT CHILDREN WANT TO KNOW 

As for the school house, we cannot now even plan the building, 
or rather, group of buildings. Quite likely we would not recognize 
the future groiij) if the plan were ]5ut before us to-day, so different 
will it be from the traditional school house. For of one thing we 
may be sure : Our schools will no longer resemble, in their methods 
and their discipline, institutions of penal servitude. They will 
not be, as now, places of forced confinement, accompanied by 
physical and mental torture during six hours of the day. Strait- 
jackets, now called educational, will no longer thwart and stifle 
the physical and mental activities of the child. We shall, on the 
contrary, take the child from the hand of God, the crown and 
glory of His creati\'e work, by Him pronounced good, and by 
Jesus blessed. We shall seize the restless activities of his body 
and mind and, instead of repressing them, we shall stimulate 
those activities, as the natural forces of growth in action. We 
shall seek to learn the instincts of the child and reverently to 
follow and obey them as guides in his development; for those 
instincts are the Voice of God within him, teaching us the direction 
of his unfolding. We will harness the natural activities of the 
child to his natural aspirations, and guide and help him in their 
realization. The child naturally wishes to do the things that adults 
do, and therefore the operations of adult hfe form the imitative 
plays of the child. The child lives in a dreamland, full of glowing 
hopes of the future, and .seeks anticipatively to live to-day the life 
of his manhood. 

So we will organize our children into a little community and teach 
them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers 
are doing in an imperfect way, in the home, in the shop, on the 
farm. We shall train the child for the life before him by methods 
which reach the jicrfection of their adaptation only when the 
child shall not be able to distinguish between the pleasures of his 
school work and the pleasures of his play. 



NO MORE BRANDING WI'IH THREE R S 

But how about the three IV f-? The moment we cease to pursue 
the three R's as abstract ends, (hsassociated with anything which 
the child has experienced, and bring them forward only when and 
as the child needs to use them in his business, he will pick them up 
as readily as ball and bat. We are under no extreme necessity of 
penning children in a room and chaining them to a bench and 
there branding the three R's upon them. The difficulties of 
school life, disciplinary and otherwise, are of the teacher's niakmg. 
They belong to a false method that has become traditional. How 
do we teach children to use carpenter's tools, for illustration? By 
studying [Mctures of these tools in books or by putting the tools 
themselves into the hands of the children, with material to work 
upon, and things to make? Precisely so with the three R's. 
They are nothing in the world but tools. Give them to the 
children as tools that they now need in somethmg definitely put 
before them, and they will learn to use them easily and naturally. 

THE SCHOOL A COOPERATIVE DEMOCRACY 

But the life is more than meat, as the body is more than raiment. 
It is in the souls of the children that our purpose rests. Nature 
studies shall acquaint every child with all that he can take in of 
that portion of nature which lies about him, in the waters below 
him, in the clouds and skies above him. The children shall learn 
the names of all the trees, their leaves, the peculiarities of their 
branching, their methods of growth, their value and use; the 
names also of all the wild birds, their songs and their habits. 
Curiosity shall be aroused about the mysteries in the waters, in the 
fields, and in the forests. Insect life not less than plant life shall 
disclose wondrous secrets to their eager eyes, so that the minds of 
the children shall be filled with interesting themes of thought, and 
their glance, wherever it falls, .shall beam with intelligence and 
inquiry. So the children shall be kept from torpor and vacancy 
of mind. The breath of life shall be breathed into their clay, and 
they shall at last become living souls. 

Ruskin has somcwlicrc said that education does not consist in 
teaching people to know what they do not know, but in teaching 



them to behave as they do not behave mentally, morally, [ihys- 
icaliy, socially. In our little microcosm of life, the children shall 
form an ideal society. Their life shall be developed and perfected 
individually through a close-knit social hfe. The child shall not 
be riveted to his separate spot; he shall not be forbidden to speak 
or to whisper; he shall not be warned not to afford help to anj- 
unfortunate near by; the mstinct to render first aid to the injured, 
so to speak, shall not be rei)resscd. Far from that, the first social 
princii>le of our school shall be to encourage the children to aid 
each other as freely as possible. Indeed, much of the teaching 
will be done imder supcn-ision by means of mutual assistance of 
the pupils. Doubtless the pupil groups will liave theii' own pui)il 
captains, as they have their baseball captains. This free social 
life of the children during all the hours of the school, conducted 
mainly out of doors, will form an ideal laboratory of manners and 
of character, affordmg opportunity for the sweetest social culture, 
courtesy, helpfulness, gentleness, deference, truth, reverence, 
honor, chivalrj-. These virtues shall form the breath and atmos- 
phere of our child community. 

THE ART OF RECREATION 

A new science or a new art, just now in process, perhaps not yet 
come to self-consciousness, shall be fully develo[)ed for our schools 
— the art of recreation for young and old, for all j)ursuits, for all 
seasons, for both sexes, indoors, out of doors. Some sweet, health- 
ful, happy, adapted recreation shall enter info the programme. 
not occasionally, but every day, for young and old alike. Ulti- 
mately, there will be professors of popular recreation. They shall 
be seait to us from the colleges, to teach us all the ways of relief 
from strain and tedium, precisely adapted. And all together we 
shall ha\e our weekly half holiday for community recreations. 

Beauty, too, we shall cultivate no less than recreation. It is 
delightful to know that the sense of beauty in sight and sound 
is instinctive in mankind, ineradicable, fundamental as hunger. 
Deeper than intelligence it lies in our physical being, and runs 
down from mankind through many orders to the ^■er>' insects. 
The sense of beauty in our rural children, as yet almost unculti- 
vated and undeveloped, is a promising field of joy and blessedness. 



13 
Accordingly, there shall be music, vocal and instrumental. Wc 
shall have an orchestra, if possible a band, a chorus — and dancing 
shall be taught in utmost grace of movement, beginning with the 
littlest children, singly and in groups. The laws of beauty are 
indeed little known as yet, but scenes of beauty shall everywhere 
be pointed out and analyzed and dwelt upon to the full, and the 
art of drawing them shall be offered to all, as a means of close 
observation, of analysis, and of more perfect recognition and 
enjoyment of beauty. 

So we have brought our little community at last to art and refine- 
ment. Such a people will demand literature and a library of their 
own. And when they begin to select and to read good books for 
themselves, our particular task will be done. Wc may leave them 
then, I think, to their natural local leaders. We have taught 
them how to live the life of the farm, of the fireside, of the rural 
community, to make it healthful, intelligent, efficient, productive, 
social, and no longer isolated. We have wakened sluggishness to 
interest and inquiry. Wc have given the mind, in the intelligent 
conduct of the daily vocation, in the study and enjoyment of 
nature, material for some of the joys of the intellectual life. We 
have trained the eye for beauty, the ear for harmony, the soul for 
gentleness and courtesy, and made jwssible to these least of 
Christ's brethren the life of love and joy and admiration. We have 
made country life more desirable than city life and raised up in the 
country the natural aristocracy of the nation. 

Such is our dream. Must it be altogether a dream? Surely, it 
ought to be and, therefore, will be, realized, if not in its processes — 
and I have described processes at all mainly for pictorial effect 
— certainly in its results. If it be an achievement beyond our 
present civilization, then our more enlightened and capable child- 
ren will certainly accomplish it. Come, in the end, it must and 
will. 

But the cost? The cost in money will be limited; the gain in 
money will be limitless. The farm demonstrations of scientific 
agriculture in the South are showing average gains of $io to $30 
per acre on soil cultivated by demonstration methods. The 
farmers themselves, therefore, could well afford in the end to pay 
the expense. The railroads alone could do it, out of their increa.sed 
traffic created thereby. A selected group of manufacturers. 



14 
another group of exporters and importers, another group of whole- 
sale merchants, another of retail merchants, could each afford to 
pay the whole expense, as a commercial investment for profit. 
And so the state, by general taxation of land, industry, trade, and 
commerce (for all would be alike benefited) could well afford to 
foot the bill; or the group of states forming the nation could 
individually pay. 

UTILIZING TBE COLLEGE-BRED YOUTH 

We shall have to look to our colleges and universities to furnish 
teachers. We have elaborate and effective apparatus, worked 
with fervid zeal, for the world-wide extension of our civilization. 
Also, for the extension downward of the blessings of civilization 
through the masses of our own people, we have powerful, costly, 
and effective apparatus, educational and religious, all being run 
with much acclaim. But the machine, as we have seen, seems 
to be running on the reverse gears. Instead of carrymg the fruits 
of civilization downward to the homes of the people, the system 
as now run is accurately adjusted to take out of the homes of the 
people a few of the choicer youths, to civilize these and to carry 
them to the top, there to group and cohere as social cream. Thus, 
the common school is adapted to select pupils for the high school. 
The high school is adjusted to select and send up annually to the 
college a quota of students prepared in the fourteen units required 
for college entrance by the Carnegie pension system. The college, 
in turn, finds its ends in the sheepskin and the cap and gown. 

The ancient scribes of Jerusalem lilcewise, not a religious order 
like the Pharisees, were a learned order. They were graduates of 
one or the other of the two ancient seats of learning at Jerusalem, 
founded in the days of Nehcmiah. Their long robes were, in fact, 
the academic gown — then, as now, the badge of learning. Be- 
ware of the scribes, who desire to walk in academic gowns and 
receive salutations in the marketplaces and the chief places in the 
synagogue and the first places at social functions. Their learning, 
their doctors' degrees, their academic gowiis, find their end in 
livelihood, in personal distinction, in social advancement, and 
not in the enrichment and uplift of the common life. Such was 
Christ's criticism of the formal learning of his day. The useful- 



IS 
ness of the college too often ends quite precisely when and where it 
ought to begin. The shei>hcr(ls are trained, but the sheep go 
shepherdless. When the spirit of education shall be changed, as it 
will be, then the direction hi which the machine works will be 
reversed, and the colleges will studiously employ themselves in 
carrying civilization with all its blessings downward to the people 
on the soil. If schools of rural life spring up in numbers, the col- 
leges will not be slow to ado|)t them and to nourish them with all 
that is best and most helpful from their ample store. Our leading 
educators are eager to escape from outworn traditions, in which 
they are enmeshed. The college campus will extend to the 
boundarj' line of the state, so as to include all its industries, its 
farms and its households. Some changes there will be, perhaps, 
in the curriculum, some additions, quite likely in the direction of 
applied science, some transfers of emphasis, no lowering, but 
rather full high advancing of standards of scholarship, culture, dis- 
cipline, research, because all will be dedicated to high and reward- 
ing ends. 

In the state of Wisconsin, now perhaps the best governed of all 
our states, the University wTites the laws that go on the statute 
books. University professors guide and control the main depart- 
ments of state administration and inquiry; there is no limit to the 
financial resources which a grateful people are placing at the 
disposal of learning, thus consecrated to the service of the common- 
wealth. Our more ancient seats of learning pride themselves 
justly on their antiquity, on their dignity, on the reverence in 
which they are held, on the great names that have been and are 
associated with them. But it is yet theirs to reign over empires 
now undreamed; to inherit a kmgdom that has awaited them 
from the foundation of the world; to write the laws of obedient 
states; to know the love of a reverent, grateful, and generous 
people; to 

"Scatter plenty o'er a smiling land 
And read their history in a nation's eyes. " 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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